VAT on Gold and Silver in 2026: Why One Is Exempt and the Other Is Not

The Direct Answer

Investment gold is exempt from VAT in the United Kingdom and across the European Union. Silver, platinum and palladium are not: they carry the standard rate wherever they are bought as bullion in those jurisdictions — 20% in the UK and 19% in Germany, to name the two rates we have checked at source for this piece. That single asymmetry does more to shape what private buyers actually own than any argument about the gold-to-silver ratio.

It is also narrower than most people assume. "Investment gold" is a defined legal term, not a synonym for gold. A gold bar can fail the definition on weight alone. A gold coin can fail it on price. And a coin in poor condition can be taxable while an identical coin in normal condition is exempt. None of this is obscure — it is written into the statutes and the tax authorities' own notices — but almost none of it survives the trip into consumer articles.

This article reads those instruments directly and quotes them. It is informational only, it is not tax or financial advice, and precious-metals prices are volatile: capital is at risk. Confirm your own position with a qualified adviser before acting on anything here.

Two boundaries before we start. This page is about VAT — the tax charged when you buy. It is not about the tax charged when you sell; that is capital gains, and it is covered separately in our cross-border guide to capital gains tax on gold. And every figure below is year-stamped to 2026, because these are exactly the rules that move.

The exemption is written for gold, and only for gold

The clearest proof of this is structural rather than rhetorical. In the UK, VAT exemptions live in Schedule 9 to the Value Added Tax Act 1994. The Schedule is organised into numbered Groups, and the full list of them reads: Land, Insurance, Postal services, Betting/gaming/dutiable machine games and lotteries, Finance, Education, Health and welfare, Burial and cremation, Subscriptions to trade unions and professional bodies, Sport, Works of art, Fund raising by charities, Cultural services, Supplies of goods where input tax cannot be recovered, Investment gold, and Supplies of services by groups involving cost sharing.

Group 15 — Investment Gold — was added with effect from 1 January 2000 by S.I. 1999/3116. There is no Group for silver. There is no Group for platinum or palladium. The exemption is not a "precious metals" exemption that silver happens to fall outside of on a technicality; it is a gold exemption, and it was drafted that way.

Germany does the same thing in a different grammar. Section 25c of the Umsatzsteuergesetz is titled Besteuerung von Umsätzen mit Anlagegold — the taxation of transactions in investment gold — and its exemption in §25c(1) is limited to Anlagegold. Ireland does it in a third: section 90 of the Value-Added Tax Consolidation Act 2010 is headed simply "Investment gold".

Three national instruments, three drafting styles, one scope. If you are buying silver in any of them, you are buying a standard-rated commodity.

What legally counts as "investment gold"

Here the three jurisdictions converge almost word for word, because all three implement the same EU regime (Articles 344 to 346 of Council Directive 2006/112/EC, the VAT Directive).

As a bar or wafer. HM Revenue & Customs, in VAT Notice 701/21 at paragraph 2.1, defines it as "gold of a purity not less than 995 thousandths that is in the form of a bar, or a wafer, of a weight accepted by the bullion markets". Ireland's section 90(1)(a)(i) says the same: a bar or wafer "of a weight accepted by a bullion market and of a purity equal to or greater than 995 parts per 1,000 parts". Germany's §25c(2) Nr. 1: "Gold in Barren- oder Plättchenform mit einem von den Goldmärkten akzeptierten Gewicht und einem Feingehalt von mindestens 995 Tausendstel."

Note what is doing the work there. Purity is the easy test — 995 fine, which every serious refiner clears. The harder test is "a weight accepted by the bullion markets", and that phrase is where small bars get into trouble. We come back to it below.

As a coin. Four conditions, all of which must hold. The coin must be minted after 1800; be of a purity of not less than 900 thousandths; be, or have been, legal tender in its country of origin; and be of a type normally sold at a price that does not exceed 180% of the open market value of the gold it contains.

The 180% rule, read twice. This is the criterion that catches people out, and it is worth noticing that the same rule is drafted two different ways in two different countries and means exactly the same thing. HMRC writes the ceiling as a total: "does not exceed 180 per cent of the open market value of the gold contained in the coin". Ireland and Germany write it as a margin: coins "normally sold at a price which does not exceed the open market value of the gold contained in the coins by more than 80 per cent" (VATCA 2010 s.90(1)(a)(ii)(IV)); "üblicherweise zu einem Preis verkauft werden, der den Offenmarktwert ihres Goldgehalts um nicht mehr als 80 Prozent übersteigt" (UStG §25c(2) Nr. 2).

180% of the gold value, and 80% above the gold value, are the same number. If you have ever seen the two figures quoted in different articles and assumed one of them was wrong, neither was. This is the practical meaning of the rule: the exemption is for coins bought as metal. Once a coin's normal price is more than 80% above its melt value, it is being bought as a collectible, and the tax system treats it accordingly.

The weight list almost nobody publishes

Section 15 of VAT Notice 701/21 exists solely to answer the "weight accepted by the bullion markets" question, and it is the most useful page in the notice. HMRC lists the weights in which bars and wafers are "commonly traded":

• London Good Delivery Bar — 12.5 kilogram
• Kilogram bars — 1 kilogram
• Gram — 500 g, 250 g, 100 g, 50 g, 20 g, 10 g, 5 g, 2.5 g, 1 g
• Ounce (1 oz = 31.1035 grams) — 100 oz, 10 oz, 5 oz, 1 oz, ½ oz, ¼ oz
• Tael (1 tael = 1.1913 oz) — 10 tael, 5 tael, 1 tael
• Tola (10 tolas = 3.75 oz) — 10 tola

Two things follow. First, this is a genuinely international list: the tael is a Chinese and Hong Kong trade weight, the tola an Indian and Middle Eastern one, and both sit in a British tax notice with the London Good Delivery bar. Gold's weights have never been an Anglo-American affair, and the statute quietly acknowledges it.

Second — and this is the part with money attached — look at what is not on the list. There is no 1/10 oz bar, no 1/20 oz bar, no 1.5 g or 3 g bar. The smallest listed weights are 1 gram and a quarter ounce. HMRC's own wording is "commonly traded in the following weights" rather than an exhaustive statutory schedule, so this is guidance rather than a closed list, and a dealer may take a different view. But if you are buying very small bars — the gift-card-format wafers, the sub-gram novelty pieces — the weight limb of the definition is the one to ask about before you assume the price you are quoted is VAT-free. Ask the dealer to confirm the VAT treatment in writing.

The coin lists: 1,421 entries, 165 issuers

Because the 180% test is a moving, market-dependent judgement, the legislation does not leave every dealer to make it alone. Article 345 of the VAT Directive requires the European Commission to publish, before 1 December each year, a list of gold coins that meet the criteria; coins on the list are deemed to qualify for the whole of the year the list covers. Ireland's statute describes the mechanism in its own words: coins "listed in the 'C' series of the Official Journal of the European Communities ... shall be deemed to fulfil those criteria for the whole year for which the list is published" (VATCA 2010 s.90(1)(b)).

The UK, post-Brexit, maintains its own equivalent. It is published as VAT Notice 701/21A, "Investment gold coins", and the list itself is a spreadsheet attached to that notice.

We downloaded the current file (Coins-update-20260615.ods, attached to a notice last updated on 3 July 2026) and counted it. It contains 1,421 coin entries, issued by 165 countries and territories — running alphabetically from Afghanistan to Zambia, and including issuers that no longer exist, such as Yugoslavia and Zaire. The United Kingdom's own block runs from the one-third guinea to the 10,000-pound piece and includes the quarter, half, single, double and quintuple sovereign. South Africa's includes Krugerrands from 1/50 oz up to 50 oz.

That number is worth holding onto for one reason: the popular framing of "VAT-free gold coins" as a short list of famous bullion issues — Sovereign, Britannia, Krugerrand, Maple, Eagle, Philharmonic — is wrong by three orders of magnitude. The exemption is broad, historical and global. If you have inherited an unfamiliar gold coin, the odds that it is on a published exempt list are much better than you would guess. Check the list before assuming otherwise; and if you are trying to establish what an inherited piece is in the first place, our note on how to store gold safely at home covers the documentation you want to build alongside it.

The condition trap

This one is genuinely counter-intuitive, and it comes straight out of VAT Notice 701/21A at paragraph 2.4:

"If a coin type is usually valued at more than 180% of its gold value, but an individual coin is in such poor condition that it is worth less than 180% of its gold value, that coin will be subject to VAT at the standard rate."

Read it slowly. The test is applied to the coin type, at its normal selling price. If the type normally trades as a collectible — above the 180% ceiling — the type is outside the exemption. A battered example of that type, worn down to something close to melt value, does not thereby become exempt. It stays standard-rated, even though on the day you buy it, it is worth less than 180% of its gold.

HMRC's own preceding paragraph concedes the awkwardness: "Of the criteria in paragraph 2.1, only the selling price of the coin is subjective." Finish and condition move the normal price, so a type usually traded in "brilliant uncirculated" condition is judged on that value, and a type usually traded in "proof" condition on the proof value.

Two related rules from the same notice, both easy to miss:

• Design changes do not create a new coin type. Paragraph 2.2: all gold coins with the same denomination, size and fineness as a listed coin are exempt, because "changes of superficial design do not alter the gold coin type or description". A sovereign with this year's reverse is the same coin as a sovereign from a century ago.
• There is no margin scheme for investment gold coins. Paragraph 2.6 is blunt: "You cannot sell investment gold coins under the margin scheme." If an offer is being explained to you as VAT-efficient because of a margin arrangement, that explanation does not apply to exempt investment gold coins.

Silver: what the tax actually costs you

Silver bullion carries the standard rate. In the UK that is 20%; in Germany, 19% under §12(1) UStG. Both figures were checked at source for this article.

The arithmetic is simple, and worth doing rather than feeling. If you pay 120 for metal worth 100, the metal has to reach 120 before you are level. That is a 20% rise in the silver price simply to return to your starting point — before any dealer buy/sell spread, before storage, before anything else. It is not a small hurdle, and it is the single most important structural difference between holding gold and holding silver in a VAT jurisdiction.

We are deliberately not publishing a table of dealer premiums or spreads to sit alongside that. There is no official source for them, they differ by dealer, product and day, and a number invented for illustration would be worse than no number at all. Get live quotes from two dealers and do the arithmetic on the actual figures in front of you.

For where the metals sit relative to one another before tax enters the picture, our analysis of gold as an inflation hedge and of gold versus bitcoin as a store of value is the place to start.

Canada draws the line somewhere else

This is the clearest demonstration that "silver is taxed and gold is not" is a feature of one legal tradition rather than a fact about metals.

Canada has no VAT; it has GST/HST. The Excise Tax Act, at section 123(1), defines a precious metal as "a bar, ingot, coin or wafer that is composed of gold, silver or platinum and that is refined to a purity level of at least (a) 99.5% in the case of gold and platinum, and (b) 99.9% in the case of silver."

Silver is in the definition. So is platinum. The same section then includes "a precious metal" in the definition of a financial instrument, which moves qualifying bullion out of the taxable-goods track and into the financial-services track altogether; and Schedule VI, Part IX, section 3 zero-rates "a supply of a financial service that is the supply of precious metals where the supply is made by the refiner thereof or by the person on whose behalf the precious metals were refined."

So the same one-ounce silver coin can be bought without a consumption tax in Canada and with 20% VAT on top in the UK. Note also that Canada's thresholds are stricter than Europe's on gold — 99.5% against the EU/UK 995 thousandths is the same number, but Canada demands 99.9% for silver, which excludes sterling and most pre-1965 circulating silver coinage from the definition.

If you are buying across borders, this is the variable that matters far more than the headline metal price. It is also a reminder that where you buy and where you are resident are different questions, both of which have tax consequences — our vault storage guide works through the storage-jurisdiction half of that.

The London Bullion Market carve-out

One more provision, because it explains a discrepancy that confuses people who read the statute and then talk to a trade counterparty.

Group 15 of Schedule 9 carries a Note (4): the exemption "does not include a supply (a) between members of the London Bullion Market Association, or (b) by a member of that Association to a taxable person who is not a member or by such a person to a member." Those transactions sit under the Terminal Markets Order instead, which zero-rates them, and VAT Notice 701/21 at paragraph 11.5 confirms that transactions between LBMA members and taxable persons who are not members are "taxable at the standard rate" with the Special Accounting Scheme applying.

For a private buyer this changes nothing about the coin or bar in your hand. It matters because it means "investment gold is exempt" is a statement about the retail supply chain, not a universal rule, and anyone quoting the statute at you in a trade context may be operating under a different provision entirely.

What there is no public answer to

This is the section most articles on this subject leave out, and it is the honest part.

• We have not reproduced the current EU coin list here. Article 345 requires it to be published in the "C" series of the Official Journal before 1 December each year. EUR-Lex serves an AWS WAF challenge to automated retrieval, and we will not quote a legal instrument we have not read. The 1,421-entry figure above is from the UK list, which we did download and count; the EU list is a separate document and is not the same list.
• We have not quoted the EU Directive verbatim. Everything attributed to Articles 344 to 346 above is stated at the level the three national implementing instruments confirm — because those we did read, in full, at source.
• There is no consolidated official table of how all 27 member states apply this in practice. The Directive sets the definition; national law and national tax administrations handle the machinery, including the notification thresholds, the option to tax, and the record-keeping obligations. In Germany, for instance, §25c(6) UStG applies the identification and record-keeping duties of the Geldwäschegesetz — the money-laundering act — on top of the ordinary VAT record rules. In the UK, VAT Notice 701/21 paragraph 3.1, which "has force of law", requires a trader to notify HMRC within 28 days of a first exempt investment-gold supply exceeding £5,000, or supplies to any one customer exceeding £10,000 in twelve months. Those are dealer obligations rather than buyer obligations, but they are the reason a reputable dealer asks you for identification on a bullion purchase.
• The United States has no VAT at all. Sales tax there is levied at state level, several states exempt bullion and several do not, and there is no single federal rule and no official consolidated table. We are not going to publish a state-by-state list we cannot source to each state's own revenue authority. If you are buying in the US, check your own state's department of revenue, and treat any table you find on a dealer's site as marketing until you have.

If you see a "global guide to VAT on precious metals" that answers all of the above with confident numbers, ask where each one came from.

What to check before you buy

1. Ask whether the specific product is being sold as exempt investment gold, and ask in writing. The answer depends on the product, not the dealer.
2. For bars, check the weight against the list above — particularly for anything smaller than 1 gram or between the listed sizes.
3. For coins, check the published list for your jurisdiction rather than assuming. The UK list is attached to VAT Notice 701/21A; EU buyers should ask the dealer to identify the coin on the current Official Journal "C" series list.
4. For silver, platinum and palladium in the UK or EU, assume the standard rate applies and build it into the break-even before you compare the price to the spot chart.
5. Do not confuse VAT with capital gains. They are separate taxes with separate rules and, in the UK, a completely different treatment of the same coin — legal-tender status matters for CGT and is only one of four criteria for VAT. Our Sovereign versus Krugerrand comparison works through a case where the two taxes point in different directions.
6. Keep the invoice. It is the document that evidences both the VAT treatment at purchase and your cost basis at disposal.

For the practical mechanics of a first purchase, our best way to buy gold overview and our note on physical gold in modern portfolios cover the ground either side of this one, and the Gold IRA versus physical gold comparison covers the US wrapper question.

Where this gets practical. If you are buying in North America rather than the UK or EU, Silver Gold Bull is a bullion dealer we hold a partnership with. We read their storefront on 26 July 2026: they list gold, silver, platinum, collectibles and jewellery, with an IRA option and a vaulted-storage programme, priced in USD and CAD. Their checkout answers sales-tax questions rather than VAT ones, so none of the European analysis above transfers to it — check your own state's or province's treatment first. That is an affiliate link, and the disclosure at the top of this page applies.

FAQ

Is gold VAT-free in the UK? Investment gold is exempt from VAT under Group 15 of Schedule 9 to the Value Added Tax Act 1994. "Investment gold" is a defined term with purity, form, weight and — for coins — price and legal-tender conditions attached. Gold that does not meet the definition is standard-rated. This is not tax advice.

Is silver VAT-free? Not in the UK or the EU. The exemption is drafted for gold alone; there is no equivalent Schedule 9 Group for silver, and no equivalent to §25c UStG or VATCA s.90. Silver bullion carries the standard rate — 20% in the UK, 19% in Germany, both checked at source in 2026.

What purity does gold need to be to qualify? For bars and wafers, not less than 995 thousandths, and the bar must be of a weight accepted by the bullion markets. For coins, not less than 900 thousandths, plus the other three coin conditions.

What does the 180% rule mean? A gold coin only qualifies if its normal selling price does not exceed 180% of the open market value of the gold it contains. Irish and German law express the identical rule as "not more than 80% above" the gold value. Coins that normally trade well above melt value are treated as collectibles and are standard-rated.

Does a damaged coin become VAT-free because it is worth less? No. VAT Notice 701/21A paragraph 2.4 applies the test to the coin type at its normal selling price. A poor-condition example of a collectible type remains standard-rated.

Is bullion taxed the same way in Canada? No. Canada has no VAT. The Excise Tax Act defines gold, silver and platinum bars, ingots, coins and wafers above set purity levels as "precious metals" and treats them as financial instruments — so silver is inside the Canadian definition and outside the European one.